Omeka Organizational Schema

The most important thing to understand about Omeka is the organizational hierarchy for content that Omeka operates from.

There are three basic hierarchical groupings for organizing your content within Omeka - Items, Collections, and Exhibits. Each of these builds on or pulls from each other depending on your organizational criteria.

Items are the individual pieces in your collection.

Collections are groups of items that have some common trait (theme, time period, artist, etc) that is important for the organization of your project.

Exhibits are essentially the entire project that you are presenting (made up of individual Items that are grouped into Collection).

IMPORTANT NOTE - The Exhibit feature has to be added with a plugin (it is easy - just follow the steps in the documentation sheet below at #3 of this section).

Design and Finishing Touches

Themes

While most really good Omeka projects include heavy CSS and PHP customization, there are several things you can do to make the project look a lot better. The themes give you a number of good jumping-off points. It usually helps to have at least a few items in and an exhibit created before changing themes - otherwise it can be difficult to discern exactly what the project looks like.

To change the theme, click on ‘Appearance’ at the top of the screen, and you’ll go directly to the theme page. You can easily test any of them out by clicking ‘Use this theme’ and then looking at the public view of the project. Each Omeka install will have all of the themes that are available and have been vetted by the developers of Omeka.

Configuring a Theme

Each theme will have a ‘Configure Theme’ button once it is selected. Configurations let you make choices about the look of your site, including adding a logo and homepage text, managing featured elements, and adding footer text. The configuration settings you make are unique to each theme and will be saved with that theme. Not all themes have the same configuration settings.

To configure your theme, click the “Configure Theme” button below the theme graphic to customize your site. While not all themes have the same configuration settings, most will have the following two sections:

Header and Footer configuration options are:

Logo file. You may upload a logo file that will replace the site title in the header of the theme. Recommended maximum width for the logo is 500px.

Header image. Upload an image file that will display across the top of each of your public website’s pages, usually below the navigation bar.

Background image. Upload an image file that will display, tiled, in the background of each of your site’s pages.

Footer text. An HTML-enabled text box where you can enter text for a site footer to appear on every page.

Display copyright in footer. Check this box if you wish to display your site’s copyright information in the footer. Site copyright information is found in the General Settings section.

Use Advanced Site-wide search. Check this box to allow public-side site visitors to search the whole site, including items, collections, and files, and to use boolean methods when searching.

Homepage configuration options:

Display Featured Item. Check this box if you wish to show a featured item on the homepage.

Display Featured Collection. Check this box if you wish to show a featured collection on the homepage.

Display Featured Exhibit. Check this box if you wish to show a featured exhibit on the homepage.

Homepage Recent Items. Choose the number of recent items to be displayed on the homepage. These will appear in the order in which they were mostly recently added to the archive.

Homepage Text. Add some text to be displayed on your homepage above the Featured Items. This is a good place to add a very short tagline or description of your site.

Save longer explanations for an About page.

Remember to save changes.

Navigation

You can customize the navigation bar by clicking ‘Appearance’ at the top of the screen, and then clicking on the ‘Navigation’ tab. You can rename or remove the default links from the bar, add links to specific Collections, Exhibits, or Simple Pages, or add external links on this screen.

Changing the default home page

You can change the default home page by clicking ‘Appearance’ at the top of the screen, and then clicking on the ‘Navigation’ tab. On the right, there is a dropdown where you can select the default home page. If the page you want to be your home page is not listed, you need to add the link to the navigation list (you can uncheck it so that it does not appear in the menu) and then select that as your home page.

If you would like the image at the bottom of your exhibit description, place the code below underneath the existing text (if you would like it at the top of the page, place the code before any of the existing text

<img src=“YOUR URL” alt=”cemetery” style=”width: 50%;” />

Replace YOUR URL with the url of the image between the quotation marks